The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (23 page)

The extraordinary thing was that not even the strange episode in Christiania made Roger suspicious. On the day they had arrived in the Norwegian capital on their way to Germany, Eivind, who had gone out alone to take a walk, was—according to his account—accosted by strangers, abducted, and taken by force to the British consulate at 79 Drammensveien. There he was interrogated by the consul himself, Mr. Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, who offered him money to reveal his companion’s identity and intentions in coming to Norway. Eivind swore to Roger he hadn’t revealed anything, and they let him go after he promised the consul to find out what they wanted to know concerning that gentleman about whom he was totally ignorant, and whom he accompanied only as a guide in a city—a country—he was unfamiliar with.

And Roger had swallowed that fantastic lie without thinking for a second he was the victim of a trap! He had fallen into it like a stupid child!

Was Eivind Adler Christensen working then for the British services? Captain Reginald Hall, head of British Naval Intelligence, and Basil Thomson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, his interrogators since he was brought to London under arrest—he’d had very long and cordial exchanges with them—gave him contradictory information about the Scandinavian. But Roger had no illusions. Now he was certain it was absolutely false that Eivind had been abducted on the streets of Christiania and taken by force to the consul with the grandiose last name: Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay. The interrogators showed him, no doubt to demoralize him—he had confirmed what fine psychologists they both were—the report of the British consul in the Norwegian capital to his superior in the Foreign Office regarding the inopportune arrival at the consulate at 79 Drammensveien of Eivind Adler Christensen, demanding to speak with the consul in person. And how he revealed, when the diplomat agreed to receive him, that he was accompanying an Irish nationalist leader traveling to Germany with a false passport and the assumed name of James Landy. He asked for money in exchange for this information and the consul gave him twenty-five kroner. Eivind offered to continue giving him private, secret material about the incognito individual as long as the British government compensated him generously.

Moreover, Hall and Thomson let Roger know that all his movements in Germany—talks with high functionaries, military men, and government ministers in the Ministry of Foreign Relations on Wilhelmstrasse as well as his encounters with Irish prisoners in Limburg—had been recorded with great precision by British intelligence. So that Eivind, as he pretended to plot with Roger, preparing a trap for Consul Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, continued communicating to the British government everything Roger said, did, wrote, and whom he received and whom he visited during his German stay.
I’ve been an imbecile and deserve my fate
, he repeated to himself for the thousandth time.

At this point the cell door opened. They were bringing him lunch. Was it midday already? He had been lost in memories as the morning passed without being aware of it. How wonderful it would be if every day were like this. He barely tasted a few mouthfuls of insipid broth and the cabbage stew with pieces of fish. When the guard came to take away the dishes, Roger asked his permission to clean the bucket of excrement and urine. Once a day he was allowed to go to the latrine to empty and rinse it. When he returned to his cell, he lay down again on his cot. The smiling, beautiful face of Eivind/Lucifer came to mind again, and with it, dejection and the sharp pangs of bitterness. He heard Eivind murmur “I love you” in his ear and it seemed he embraced him and pressed him close. He heard himself moan.

He had traveled a great deal, had intense experiences, known all kinds of people, investigated horrible crimes against primitive peoples and indigenous communities on two continents. And was it possible he would be left stupefied by so duplicitous, unscrupulous, and base a personality as that of the Scandinavian Lucifer? He had lied to him, systematically deceived him at the same time he appeared to be cheerful, useful, and affectionate as he accompanied Roger like a faithful dog, served him, took an interest in his health, went to buy him medicines, called the doctor, took his temperature. But he also took all the money from him that he could. And then he invented trips to Norway on the pretext of visiting his mother, his sister, in order to run to the consulate and report on the conspiratorial, political, and military activities of his superior and lover. And there he charged them as well for those accusations. And Roger had thought he was the one managing the thread of the plot! Roger had instructed Eivind, since the British wanted to kill him—according to the Norwegian, Consul Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay had literally assured him of it—to continue on course until he obtained proof of the criminal intentions of British functionaries toward him. For how many kroner or pounds sterling had Eivind communicated this to the consul? And therefore, what Roger believed would be a devastating publicity campaign against the British government—accusing it publicly of planning the murder of its adversaries and violating the sovereignty of third countries—did not have the slightest repercussions. His public letter to Sir Edward Grey, a copy of which he had sent to all the governments represented in Berlin, did not even merit acknowledgement of its receipt at a single embassy.

But the worst—Roger again felt that pressure in his stomach—came later, at the end of his long interrogations in Scotland Yard, when he believed Eivind/Lucifer would not permeate those dialogues again. The final blow! The name of Roger Casement was in all the newspapers of Europe and the world—a British diplomat knighted and decorated by the Crown was going to be tried as a traitor to his country—and news of his imminent trial was announced everywhere. Then, Eivind Adler appeared in the British consulate in Philadelphia, proposing, with the consul as intermediary, to travel to England to testify against Roger, as long as the British government would cover all his travel and lodging expenses “and he would receive acceptable remuneration.” Roger did not doubt for a second the authenticity of the report from the British consul in Philadelphia that Hall and Thomson showed him. Fortunately, the rubicund face of the Scandinavian Satan did not appear in the witnesses’ dock during the four days of his trial in the Old Bailey. Because when he saw him perhaps Roger would not have been able to contain his rage and the longing to strangle him.

Was that the face, the mentality, the viperish contortion of original sin? In one of his conversations with Edmund D. Morel, when both were wondering how it was possible for cultured, civilized people who had received a Christian education to perpetrate and take part in the horrifying crimes both men had documented in the Congo, Roger said: “When there are no more historical, sociological, psychological, cultural explanations, there is still a vast field in darkness where you can reach the root of evil in human beings, Bulldog. If you want to understand it, there is a single path: stop reasoning and turn to religion: it is original sin.”

“That explanation doesn’t explain anything, Tiger.”

They argued for a long time without reaching a conclusion. Morel affirmed: “If the ultimate reason for evil is original sin, then there is no solution. If we humans are made for evil and carry it in our souls, why fight to find a remedy for what is irremediable?”

Bulldog was right, one mustn’t fall into pessimism. Not all human beings were Eivind Adler Christensen. There were others, noble, idealistic, good, and generous, like Captain Robert Monteith and Morel himself. Roger grew sad. Bulldog had not signed any of the petitions in his favor. No doubt he disapproved of his friend (former friend now, like Herbert Ward?) taking Germany’s side. Even though he opposed the war and waged a pacifist campaign and had been tried for it, no doubt Morel did not forgive him for his support of the Kaiser. Perhaps, like Conrad, he also considered him a traitor.

Roger sighed. He had lost many admirable, dear friends, like these two. How many more had turned their backs on him! But in spite of everything, he hadn’t changed his way of thinking. No, he had not been wrong. He still believed that in this conflict, if Germany won, Ireland would be closer to independence. And further away from it if victory favored Britain. He had done what he did not for Germany but for Ireland. Couldn’t men as lucid and intelligent as Ward, Conrad, and Morel understand that?

Patriotism blinded lucidity. Alice had affirmed this in a hard-fought debate during one of the evening get-togethers at her house on Grosvenor Road that Roger always recalled with so much nostalgia. What had the historian said exactly? “We should not allow patriotism to do violence to our lucidity, our reason, our intelligence.” Something like that. But then he remembered the ironic dart thrown by George Bernard Shaw at all the Irish nationalists present: “They’re irreconcilable, Alice. Make no mistake: patriotism is a religion, the enemy of lucidity. It is pure obscurantism, an act of faith.” He said this with the mocking irony that always made the people he spoke to uncomfortable, because everyone intuited that beneath what the dramatist said in a genial way there was always a destructive intention. “Act of faith” in the mouth of this skeptic and unbeliever meant “superstition, fraud” or even worse. Still, this man who did not believe in anything and railed against everything was a great writer and had brought more prestige to Irish letters than any other of his generation. How could you construct a great work without being a patriot, without feeling that profound kinship to the land of your forebears, without loving and being moved by the ancient lineage behind you? For that reason, if asked to choose between two great creators, Roger secretly preferred Yeats to Shaw. The first was certainly a patriot who had nourished his poetry and theater with the old Irish and Celtic legends, adapting them, renovating them, demonstrating they were alive and could bear fruit in present-day literature. An instant later he regretted having thought this way. How could he be ungrateful to George Bernard Shaw: among the great intellectual figures in London, in spite of his skepticism and articles against nationalism, no one had acted more explicitly and courageously in defense of Roger Casement than the dramatist. He advised a line of defense to his lawyer that, unfortunately, poor Serjeant A. M. Sullivan, that greedy nonentity, did not accept, and after the sentence, George Bernard Shaw wrote articles and signed manifestos in favor of commuting the death penalty. One did not have to be a patriot and nationalist to be generous and brave.

Having thought of Serjeant Sullivan demoralized him, made him relive his trial for high treason in the Old Bailey, those four sinister days at the end of June 1916. It had been in no way easy to find a litigant attorney who would agree to defend him in the High Court. Everyone that George Gavan Duffy, his family, and his friends contacted in Dublin and London refused on a variety of pretexts. No one wanted to defend a traitor to his country in wartime. Finally, the Irishman Sullivan, who had never defended anyone before a London court, agreed, though he did demand an excessive sum of money that Roger’s sister Nina and Alice Stopford Green had to collect by means of donations from those sympathetic to the Irish cause. Going against Roger’s wishes, for he wanted to openly accept responsibility as a rebel and fighter for independence and use the trial as a platform to proclaim Ireland’s right to sovereignty, Sullivan imposed a legalistic, formal defense, avoiding the political and maintaining that the statute of Edward III under which Roger was being tried applied only to acts of treason in the territory of the Crown, not abroad. The acts the accused was charged with committing had taken place in Germany, and therefore Casement could not be considered a traitor to the Empire. Roger never believed this defense strategy would succeed. To make matters even worse, on the day he made his statement, Serjeant Sullivan presented a pitiable spectacle. Shortly after beginning his argument he began shaking, convulsing, until overcome by a corpselike pallor, he exclaimed: “Your Honors! I cannot continue!” and fell to the courtroom floor in a faint. One of his assistants had to conclude his statement. Just as well that Roger, in his final exposition, was able to take over his own defense, declaring himself a rebel, defending the Easter Rising, asking for the independence of his country, and saying he was proud to have served it. That text filled him with pride and, he thought, would justify him to future generations.

What time was it? He couldn’t become accustomed to not knowing the time. What thick walls Pentonville Prison had, because no matter how closely he listened, he never could hear sounds from the street: bells, motors, shouts, voices, whistles. The din of Islington Market, did he really hear it or did he invent it? He no longer knew. Nothing. At this moment, a strange sepulchral silence seemed to suspend time and life. The only noises that filtered into his cell came from inside the prison: muffled steps in the corridor outside, metal doors opening and closing, the sheriff’s nasal voice giving orders to a jailer. Now no sound reached him, not even from the interior of the prison. The silence filled him with distress and kept him from thinking. He tried to resume his reading of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
, but he couldn’t concentrate and put the book back on the floor. He attempted to pray but the prayer seemed so mechanical, he stopped. He was motionless for a long time, tense, uneasy, his mind blank and his gaze fixed on a point in the ceiling that seemed damp, as if there were a leak, until he fell asleep.

He had a quiet dream that took him to the Amazonian jungles on a luminous, sunny morning. The breeze blowing over the bridge of the ship attenuated the devastating heat. There were no mosquitoes and he felt well, without the burning in his eyes that had tormented him recently, an infection seemingly invulnerable to all the drops and washes of the ophthalmologists, without the muscular pains of arthritis, or the fire of hemorrhoids that at times seemed like burning metal in his intestines, or the swelling of his feet. He didn’t suffer from any of those discomforts, diseases, and ailments, the aftermath of his twenty years in Africa. He was young again and wanted to do here, in the exceedingly wide Amazon River whose banks he could not even see, one of those mad acts he had done so often in Africa: strip and dive from the railing of the ship into the water green with clumps of grass and splashed with foam. He would feel the impact of the warm, dense water all over his body, a benign, purifying sensation, as he propelled himself up to the surface, emerged, and began to swim, gliding with the ease and elegance of a dolphin to the side of the boat. From the deck the captain and some passengers would make exaggerated gestures for him to get back in the boat, not run the risk of drowning or being devoured by a
yacumama
, one of the river snakes that sometimes were ten meters long and could swallow a man whole.